The classic: Queen; Bohemian Rhapsody, “Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard”

There was a girl at a party who started screaming “there’s a fire downtown!” and nobody knew what she was on about until we recognized the melody from “it’s the final countdown”.

Tangential:

Most of my music came from Tony Hawks games, and one particular song kept coming up that I, at the time, hated a lot just because of how random it tried to be: Assorted Jelly Beans - Rebel Yell.

Other than sounding like a grating childish aneurysm, the lyrics were almost impossible to understand since they’re sung in a shouty yet lazy kind of way. This used to piss me off immensely as a kid whenever this song popped up, but over the years it grew on me and I began to see it in a new light.

It’s essentially a bunch of different songs crammed into one, haphazardly blended together through a series of bridges and resets, and yet it somehow holds together as a coherent song.

There’s one particular bridge at 2:39 that essentially summarizes the whole ethos of the song, and even with the lyrics, it’s a genuine challenge to say the lyrics on beat:

Spotlight’s shining
(thought you had something to saay)
Hourglass is pouring, your boring crowd fades awaay
Boring crowd fades away

Give it a go, it’s harder than it looks to sing it on beat.

Anyway it’s a great song, and I challenge you to count how many individual mood shifts you can detect

Why am I talking about this? Your post reminded me of the the Adolescents - Amoeba song featured on the THPS soundtrack, and for a long time I thought the lyrics weren’t “Amoebaaa”, but the “the peopleeeeeee”.

We went with “he’s got his trampoline”. We were pretty sure it couldn’t actually be that, but there were no other suggestions.

Pre-internet, unless you owned the record, and they’d printed the lyrics on the sleeve, you pretty much had to guess. It’s quite funny looking at the lyrics for 80s/90s tracks now, and finding out what they were actually saying, vs what we thought they were as kids/teens.

A particularly amusing one to look back on was Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell.

It actually says “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot”.

By now, we all know American language well enough to know “parking lot” is the American phrase for “car park”, but at the time, none of us had ever heard it. A “lot” only meant “many”.

What we had heard of, was a “park and ride”, a new scheme where car users could park on the outskirts of town and get a shuttle bus into the centre.

We also slightly misheard the first bit, so our two options were:

“If it ain’t paradise, put up a park and ride”

Or

“If it ain’t paradise, put up a park and laugh”.

tool - Ænema

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A.
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.

Learn to swim, see you down in Arizona Bay.

The last line… Since the first I heard it when it was released until I was corrected only about a year ago, I heard:

learn to swim, See you drowning - help is on the way

I always thought it was a sarcastic line by Maynard.